In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

I was telling someone how we roll changes to production at dealnews and they seemed really amazed by it. I have never really thought it was that impressive. It just made sense. It has kind of happened organically here over the years. Anyhow, I thought I would share.

Some of the key technologies they use are things like Subversion for source code versioning, a script similar to svnmerge.py to do their merging for production, their staging server, makefiles for deployment and notifications sent out via XAMPP about how the build went and details on the release.

Michael Kimsal has release the last podcast of his MySQL Conference series of interviews with other attendees. In this episode, he interviews Brian Moon of the Phorum project (employed at DealNews.com).

Brian was kind enough to review both of his presentations which go in to great detail about the scaling issues he's faced both with DealNews.com and the Phorum forum software project (which recently turned 10 years old!) [...] Thanks to Brian for going over things in such detail!

You can download this latest episode from the WebDevRadio site as well as check out Brian's slides from his MySQL conference presentation.

In a recent blog post, Brian Moon talks about doing something he never thought he'd do - storing files in a database. He does, however, have two legitimate places he's found it useful.

Now, most people will say you should never do this. And lots of time they are right. And once upon a time I agreed with them without question. Then I started living in the real world where sometimes you have to do things you never thought you would. Here are the two places where I stores files in a database.

His places are in Phorum, using the method to keep the system's database and file attachments contained and easier to move around, and in the replication of their databases, making it simple to have images for the deals on dealnews transferable to the various slave databases.